“In a win for small business, the Minister for Employment Senator Eric Abetz today announced that small business operators will now be able to rely on advice from the Fair Work Ombudsman without the fear of prosecution, should the information be incorrect.”

My thought on this is simply… How Ridiculous!

1. Ridiculous that you can’t get correct advice from Fair Work in the first place.
2. Ridiculous that the press release leads small business operators to think that they won’t be prosecuted for following incorrect advice, because Fair Work are reluctant to put their advice in writing, which makes it very hard to build a case on the advice they actually gave you at the time.
3. Ridiculous that a statement like this will lead small business to unrealistically expect that they can prove the content of a phone call if a case was actually made against them by Fair Work.
4. Ridiculous because my experience has shown me that you need to ask the right questions, to get the right advice from not only Fair Work, but of all payroll and employer association advice lines.

My advice to anyone seeking information from Fair Work, that involves a compliance issue that you could be later prosecuted or fined for (which in reality is very question you would ever have of the Fair Work Ombudsman), is that you get that information in writing as it may ultimately become evidence that you require to defend your actions.

To ensure you don’t venture into the grey area on seeking advice, it would be wise to follow these four best practices when seeking legislative advice:

1. Do your research – don’t go in blind. Before you make an enquiry with Fair Work, investigate your question as much as you can via the Fair Work website and Google to understand the anomalies that may exist in relation to your enquiry, because most HR, Payroll and Industrial Relations questions rely on understanding multiple pieces of legislation and awards, and more often than not multiple clauses and sub clauses of each of these to reach your final definitive answer.

My own experience with many self-proclaimed payroll “subject matter experts” and having made more phone calls to Fair Work than I can remember, has proven time and again that misinformation is rife.

2. Beware of how you frame your questions and what questions you ask. Asking the right questions is essential, which is an awfully hard ask if you are inexperienced and are expecting your information provider to be the holder of all wisdom.

It is better to ask ten questions than one, to ensure you and the person providing the advice completely understand the questions, the intent of the questions and the answers being offered. There are quite often “but if”, or “except in the case of” exceptions that apply to employment law and you may not be receiving all of the information you require, if your questioning is misleading or incomplete.

Again, this is why it’s important to research and have a little background knowledge on the question/s you are trying to answer and to always think “how will this advice stand up in court”.

3. Get it in writing! Everything in payroll and HR is a potential legal issue and your best defence in a legal matter is evidence. Again, when seeking advice, utilise email where you can for a clear audit trail and ask to be directed to documented evidence of the advice you are receiving, so you can print that out as well, such as the published pay rates, or the clauses of the applicable legislative documents, or a publication on the Fair Work website.

Fair Work have made it impossible to get a direct response to a question in writing. They offer only a telephone advice line, or an out of office hours email service, from which they will ring you back within 5 days (which someone at Fair Work mistakenly thinks is customer service). They used to have an online chat facility, that enabled you to print out the conversation, but that’s been shut down. The only “in writing” response you can get from Fair Work these days is to print out information they have available on their website.

Seeking legislative advice via telephone (from any source including employer and payroll/HR associations) is a last resort and where this is your only option, you should ensure your questions are all documented and as each question is answered, document the advice you receive. The date and time of the phone call also needs to be documented, along with the full name and position of the person you spoke to.

4. Double Check the Advice… Any advice that you receive from an individual should be verified and with the volume of information freely available on the internet, verification is not hard to accomplish. Whether that individual is your payroll officer, an accountant, a Fair Work representative or a telephone advisor from an association, you cannot be sure of their ability to correctly interpret legislation or their wealth of experience in doing so.

I’m probably not telling you anything new, by stating that employment legislation is complex, multi-faceted and relatively difficult to stay fully abreast of unless that is your full time role.

When you seek advice from an organisation who professes to be the font of knowledge you would expect that their advice should be gospel, but that is not always the case.

The law holds the owners, directors and responsible officers of the business liable for compliance and ignorance of the law is never an excuse for non-compliance. As such it is your responsibility to ensure you have full information, correct interpretation or a damn good defence case.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

The new Australian Privacy Principles came into effect on March 12, 2014 and replace the National Privacy Principles and apply to all organisations (with some exceptions), as well as Australian government agencies.

The objective of the Principles is to ensure that organisations manage personal information in “an open and transparent way” and some of the key areas that relate to payroll functions include:

All organisations must take reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure the organisation complies with the Australian Privacy Principles and to provide a system of dealing with enquiries and/or complaints

All organisations must have a clearly expressed and up to date policy about the management of personal information, including:

The kinds of information the organisation collects and holds

How the organisation collects and holds the personal information

The purpose of the collection, holding, use and disclosure of the information

How an individual may access personal information and correct any information

How an individual may complain about a breach of the Principles

Whether the organisation is likely to disclose the personal information to an overseas entity

If the organisation is likely to disclose personal information to an overseas entity, the countries in which that may occur

Organisations must not collect personal information unless the information is reasonably necessary for one or more of the organisation’s functions or activities

Organisations must not collect “sensitive” information about an individual unless an individual consents to the collection and the information is reasonably necessary for one or more of the organisations functions or activities

If “sensitive” personal information is collected as a requirement by law or a “permitted general situation exists in relation to the collection of the information”

Where an organisation holds personal information that was collected for a particular purpose (the primary purpose), the organisation must not use or disclose the information for another purpose (a secondary purpose) unless the individual has consented, or the individual would reasonably expect the organisation to use or disclose the personal information for the secondary purpose, or if the use or disclosure of the personal information is required or authorised under an Australian law

Before an organisation discloses personal information about an individual to an overseas recipient, the organisation must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the overseas recipient does not breach the Australian Privacy Principles

An organisation must take reasonable steps to ensure the integrity of all personal information to ensure the information is accurate, up to date and complete

An organisation must take reasonable steps to ensure the personal information is protected from misuse, interference and loss and from unauthorized access, modification or disclosure

If an organisation refuses to correct the personal information as requested by the individual, the entity must give the individual a written notice that sets out the reasons for the refusal, the mechanisms available to the individual to complain about the refusal and any other matter prescribed by the regulations

All organisations must take reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure the organisation complies with the Australian Privacy Principles and to provide a system of dealing with enquiries and/or complaints

All organisations must have a clearly expressed and up to date policy about the management of personal information, including:

If you are a Payroll Manager or hold a position of responsibility for the management, security, disclosure and use of personal information you can be fined under the Act for non-compliance, apparently up to $340,000. I’ve not studied the Act yet to understand whether this is per offence, which could be a devastating blow for an individual who is responsible for the disclosure of a substantial numbers of employee’s information, where there is a security breach or a non-compliant business practice.

If your organisation hasn’t made a big deal out of the new Australian Privacy Principles as far as payroll is concerned, especially if you outsource any part of your payroll function, you have a couple of days to establish how your payroll function will ensure compliance.

According to this Smart Company article on 5th March 2014 “The laws will apply to businesses that turn over more than $3 million a year and collect personal data.

However, there are some small businesses which turn over less than $3 million that will still need to abide by the new legislation. For example, the laws apply if the business is a health services provider, related to a larger business, trades in personal information, or is a contractor which provides services under a Commonwealth contract.”

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

No in-house payroll team is safe anymore. The ever present reality is that if your organisation hasn’t already looked into the viability of outsourcing payroll production, in an attempt to realise significant cost and efficiency benefits, it is only a matter of time until it does.

Payroll BPO is a Global Competitive Market

At the local level you compete against small business operators claiming to be the most experienced outsourced provider in the market and there are bookkeeping and accounting firms, payroll associations and HRIS software providers all supplying payroll BPO services. Then there are those businesses whose core business is Payroll Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), who vary in size and capacity enormously. The global market has added extra dimension to the BPO market, creating massive competition in cost competitiveness.

All BPO’s are Flogging the Same Horse

Find me a Payroll BPO who is not selling the promises of:

The realisation of efficiencies and time savings

Reduced production costs and overheads

Continuity, Risk Management and Total Compliance

Superior Speed, Technical Expertise

Greater operational control for the business

Technological Superiority

Reduced Recruitment Costs and Staffing Flexibility

The ability for your business to concentrate on it’s your core business

Can BPO’s Really Achieve the Miraculous?

The ability of any BPO in the marketplace to achieve this remarkable list of business improvements relies on many interconnected factors… many of which aren’t fully understood by those in the deciding seat. It is important to understand what real differences exist between in-house and outsourced payroll functions and whether outsourcing is really the miracle it’s sold as.

Here are just a few areas that require thorough analysis in the decision making process, rather than blind belief:

HRIS System Capabilities

The quality and capabilities of a BPO’s HRIS system will depend on the size of the BPO business. The corporate payroller who decided to start a payroll outsourcing business will be utilising an off the shelf accounting package or a lower cost cloud based system. National and global BPO’s will be building robust, client tested systems and will have more experience in implementations, which should guarantee a smoother transition… unless that system needs to be customised heavily to achieve your requirements, which can lead to untested and unparalleled disaster.

A true understanding of the capabilities and the shortcomings of the systems used by BPO’s will enable you to make a real comparison between your in-house system and the BPO offerings.

Business Processes

BPO’s would not survive without solid business processes and strict deadlines. When working with a BPO you will be afforded windows of time for processing and queries and your own business systems must be advanced enough to succeed in your business relationship and to get your payroll delivered on time, every time.

If your in-house system is in chaos due to data integrity issues, receipt of late inputs and misconfiguration of your current payroll system, you will not realise some magical transformation by simply outsourcing this mess to a BPO. Garbage in will always equate to garbage out.

Economies of Scale

The whole basis of achieving economies of scale is to define the one process that fits all, allowing for only slight deviations for individual business requirements. If your business can fit itself into the BPO’s processes, all is well, but if your business requires deviations to the BPO’s standard business processes and has a list of required value added services, the cost of the service rises proportionately.

Cost Savings

I’ve managed two outsourcing services and it has always bewildered me why people buy in to this. Cost savings are achieved by any payroll service, in-house or outsourced, by minimizing the time it takes to produce a payroll and the ancillary costs associated with payroll production.

If an in-house service wants to ensure their longevity, then my advice would be to get your costs down to bare minimum by implementing automations, reducing paper and payslip costs, maximizing your HRIS system and establishing if the current wages cost of the payroll team can realistically be reduced. The people in your organisation who will be, or who currently are, looking at outsourced options, will see cost as a major incentive.

All BPO’s have a stock standard service that basically includes accepting an upload file or your business entering the data into their system; performing the payroll calculations and producing the stock standard reports. If this is all you want from payroll, then by all means jump in and realise those cost savings. If however, you want a little extra here and there, grab your wallet and watch those cost savings begin to diminish.

Let You Get On With Managing Your Business

This selling point is touted by every BPO provider globally, but I believe it’s a myth as the business only outsources a portion of the total end to end process. Someone at the business still needs to create and manage the inputs; check and authorise the payroll reports; attend to the employee, management and third party enquiries; reconcile the payroll; perform the management and statutory reporting functions; and above all else ensure the compliance of the data and the process.

Additional Charges for Out of Scope Functions

Want a report that’s not in scope? Want to change the pay rates due to an award change or salary increase? Want to retrieve historical data from two years ago? It can be quite alarming, once the contract is signed by a business owner or manager, who may have little to no concept of the requirements of payroll, just how much additional information needs to be retrieved from the HRIS system. Much of this will be out of scope and will cost the business, either in the charges for the reporting or for the time it takes in-house to devise a workaround.

Superior Technical Expertise

This one always gets me… how can this sweeping statement be made by some BPO’s when your organisation may already employ a perfectly competent payroll person, or even a whole team of them.

Some larger BPO’s may in fact employ specialists in employment law, or IT and so on, but that may not necessarily translate well into the product or service the BPO customer buys. Before a business buys in to the guru status, it should understand exactly how much specialist knowledge exists in its own business via its payroll team members and establish how the gurus will provide an actual realisable benefit to their payroll production, if they were to outsource the payroll.

Total Compliance

The way the compliance dream is sold to businesses concerns me, as it appears to the buyer that simply by outsourcing your payroll, you are guaranteed that every facet of your payroll all of a sudden becomes compliant, and you needn’t worry your little head about it ever again. This is the farthest thing from the truth.

When you hand over the control of your organisations greatest expense and probably most organisations greatest compliance nightmare, you don’t cease to be liable… you don’t cease to monitor and examine… and more importantly, you should never cease to control.

The simplest configuration error, or the insufficiently tested customisation can wreak havoc on pay rates, tax, superannuation, salary packaging…everything. Compliance in every facet and down to the tiniest detail, remains at all times the business’s responsibility, not the BPO’s. Put simply, don’t buy in to the total compliance sales pitch.

Offering of an End to End Payroll Service

Hmmm… by whose definition? I’ve always understood end to end payroll to be all of the processes from the receipt of new employee documentation and employee timesheets, through to the completion of all associated company and statutory reporting, and including all employee, management and third party enquiries and requests in between.

I’ve not seen a BPO yet that encompasses what my definition of end to end payroll is. Nor have I witnessed a BPO yet that doesn’t require a designated person on the ground in the business to compile all of the data and be responsible for employee queries.

Risk Management

There are so many aspects to the risk management and mitigation of payroll that would be hard to fit into a paragraph, but a few of the main concerns to be addressed for those contemplating outsourcing are:

Noise. If your payroll service rings so loud in the ears of the stakeholders, consider yourself a branded target for outsourcing. If you have a high error rate and there are constant complaints making their way to the leaders of the business, get your error rates sorted very quickly and eliminate the noise.

Understand Your Competition

The point has already been made… every in-house payroll service is in competition with the sizeable BPO market. In any business, you must understand… truly understand… who and what your competition is and what your competitors are offering, in order to continue to compete against them.

In-house Payroll Managers who are blind or oblivious to this, need to wake up. BPO’s are knocking incessantly on the doors of the decision makers in your business, trying to get their foot in the door.

Now that you understand more about the BPO Market and how the business you work for is on the prospect list of a gazillion BPO providers, you have two choices… start looking for a job in a BPO or start ensuring your in-house payroll service remains a viable business option for your organisation.

Differentiation is One of the Keys to In-House Survival

For any business to outshine its competition, it needs to identify or create differentiation between them and all the other operators in the market. Their customers must be able to clearly see the points of difference and those points of difference had better be ones that draw customers in, rather than turn them away. Your in-house payroll service is no different.

Outsourced service providers all over the world are professing how amazingly more cost effective your organisation’s payroll process will be. They are claiming that their world standard business processes will not only enable outstanding efficiencies, but reap the rewards of economies of scale and all but ensure the organisation’s payroll compliance.

Do yourself and your payroll team a favour and start raising the bar on your service, analysing and minimising your costs, elevating your team’s capabilities and eliminating any “noise”… and start today!

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

As a Payroll Manager, you are responsible for managing what is the greatest cost of most organisations and with that comes the continued attention of Finance, C-Level Management and the Board. You are being monitored and usually measured on cost and efficiency and you are always at risk of being outsourced to a more viable option.

As a manager of a service offering in your organisation, you need to be a “business” manager who is focused on achieving organisational goals and outcomes, on providing service to your “customers” that could not possibly be matched by competitors and on the cost of payroll production.

If you are not already measuring, monitoring and acting upon Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in your payroll service, you need to start NOW.

KPI’s are quantifiable indicators that reflect the organisational goals and are supposed to be drivers of change and measures of progress.

Payroll has long been viewed as a purely transactional processing cost centre, whose only organisational goals are to minimise the cost of processing and keep payroll noise to an absolute minimum. While these are primary goals for cost reasons, many other complexities come into play as to why payroll costs what it does.

Only by measuring and taking calculated steps to improve the KPI’s, will you be able to truly reduce payroll costs, as many of the reasons for the cost of payroll are completely outside of the Payroll Managers control such as data integrity, industrial complexity and statutory requirements for example.

Personally, I have a few issues with the apparent simplicity of payroll KPI’s and the comparison of organisations against each other, or against best practices. The measurement of cost, transaction volumes and time to complete tasks alone does not truly measure the performance of a payroll team as there are an abundance of variables coming into play for every number recorded.

No two payroll operations are like for like. There are different operating systems, differing policies and company practices, differing complexities and differing definitions of end to end payroll.

I also believe that the global standard for compilation of payroll KPI data misses three very important categories: Service Excellence, Best Practice Business Processes and Compliance.

A payroll service’s primary function is to produce on-time, compliant employee payments… but getting the money into employee’s hands is far from the end of the payroll process. Management and statutory reporting can be a huge portion of a payroll team’s workload, as can be the day to day enquiries of the workforce and other organisations relating to employee payments and financial matters.

Additionally, every payroll service on this earth, no matter their size, should aim to have best practice documented processes, checklists, segregations of duty and audit steps throughout the process, so this should be included in the KPI’s and be a major objective of the payroll team and the organisation.

These are the Minimum KPI’s Payroll Should Be Measuring as per global industry practice:

(HR/P&C KPI’s are excluded as the focus is solely on payroll production)

THE COST OF PAYROLL – intends to measure the cost to business of the end to end payroll process, which usually encompasses the sum total of wage and operating costs of the payroll team and the cost of implementing and maintaining HRIS and related systems. For a true cost of end to end payroll, all people in the organisation that contribute to any component of the end to end payroll process should be identified and accounted for such as:

IT costs involved in implementation and maintenance of HRIS and related systems

Payroll Accounting costs

The wages cost of staff compiling timesheets for payroll input

Supervisors and management wages cost for time spent on payroll processing and enquiries

HR/P&C wages cost for time spent on the transactional components of payroll processing

The combined results of these metrics will assist you to determine the cost drivers of payroll production:

Cost of Payroll (Total Wage Cost All Employees) as a Percentage of Revenue

Number of Payroll Processes Per Annum

Cost of Payroll Production Per Employee Serviced (Total Operating Cost of Payroll Service per employee serviced by the payroll)

Cost of Payroll Production per Payroll FTE

PRODUCTIVITY – intends to measure how productive the payroll team as a whole and individually are, by measuring the ratio of payroll people to the number of employees being serviced. Additional metrics allow identification of issues affecting productivity. Standard metrics include:

Number of Pays Processed Per Payroll Processor FTE

Number of Out of Cycle Payments Processed

Number of Retrospective Payments

Number of payments requiring manual intervention or follow up

Input that contains unclean data

EFFECTIVENESS – intends to measure whether the payroll team are achieving the required outcomes (on-time, compliant payroll production) and identify factors that may be inhibiting their effectiveness. There are a host of metrics utilised to measure effectiveness and include:

SERVICE – regular measurement of the perception of service by those we serve, including:

A regular rating by employees to establish the current perceived level of service and identify improvement areas (perceived or real)

A regular rating by your internal customers and by supervisors and management on their perception of the payroll service

Regular ratings against the achievement of Service Level Agreements

Compilation of data on queries such as long term unresolved employee queries, union action as a result of payroll actions and other day to day categories of enquiry in order to identify service demands and improvement areas

COMPLIANCE – as a core function of the payroll service, measurement of the continued achievement of organisational and statutory compliance including:

Outcomes of audit reports

Compliance with company policies and procedures

Achievement of management reporting deadlines

Correct, on time and compliant statutory reporting and payments

Achievement against monthly internal compliance reviews

Breaches of employment legislation , award requirements, etc

Breaches of service level agreements

BEST PRACTICE BUSINESS PROCESSES – there is enough global evidence, supporting legislation and standards that demand that all payrolls should be produced utilising best practice business processes to ensure corporate governance, financial transaction security and so on. The measurement of the payroll service’s achievement towards best practice business processes should identify:

All processes and sub processes in the production of payroll are documented and reviewed regularly for compliance and best practice

Documented checklists are utilised for payroll processes and signed off by relevant overseers at each vital step of the payroll process

Payroll balancing is exhaustive and each authoriser throughout the process understands the full extent of what they are authorising

Segregation of duties is well documented, authorisations are achieved and a process for monitoring each step of the payroll process exists

Error identification and fraud prevention process checkpoints are included throughout the processes and checklists

Business policies are documented for information security, confidentiality, privacy, authorisations, etc and the requirements of each policy are implemented within the processes

If your payroll service is measuring and monitoring the metrics and KPI’s listed, I applaud your efforts! If you are part way there, then I urge you to build in these additional KPI’s and identify further improvement areas for your service. If you are not measuring, open up a new excel spreadsheet NOW! and start pumping in the numbers you need to measure your base line data.

The data on its own though is insufficient, as you need to identify targets for each of your KPI’s and monitor these as you implement your improvements, to ensure your efforts are actually achieving the intended outcomes.

Many payroll services benchmark themselves against others, or against industry, country or global best practice KPI’s. Before deciding how you will utilise benchmarking, it is important to understand the dynamics behind the numbers. Essential to your understanding though, is that you must drill down into the numbers to understand the measurement method of the benchmarks you apply; the complexities of the organisations you measure yourself against; the HRIS systems and processes in place; and a host of other reasons that another payroll service may be producing twice as many employee payments as your team, with half the staff.

Remembering that KPI’s are quantifiable indicators that reflect the organisational goals and are supposed to be drivers of change and measures of progress, it is imperative that you understand what the goals actually are for the payroll service and include measurements that will provide actionable data that identifies what issues exist and what improvements need to be implemented.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

While business is to be commended for the efforts to share the benefits of salary packaging with employees across the board, it still confounds me that employees are entering into salary packaging arrangements oblivious to the REAL financial impact on their finances.

If you are going to offer a broad based Salary Packaging program to your employees, you MUST educate your employees, or at the very least strongly encourage them to seek independent financial advice from the ATO, their financial planner, tax adviser or accountant. An employee will be far more encouraged to seek advice, if they understand along with the pros, that there are some serious cons.

The greatest unknown by most Australian employees is the impact of Reportable Fringe Benefits on their assessable income and the consequence of that increased assessable income on their entitlement to government benefits, multiple tax offsets, child support obligations and entitlements and HELP/SFSS repayment calculations.

Employers present calculations to the employees showing the net pay difference between a packaged and non-packaged salary, often without any reference to the potential consequences of their increased Reportable Fringe Benefits amount on their payment summaries. Employees sign up to the salary packaging programme wholeheartedly, rejoicing in their “extra” income… until they submit their tax return.

Once their tax return is processed, many employees learn a very hard lesson. Their windfall in undertaking salary packaging, has just earned them lost tax benefits; or an increased debt to the ATO for HELP/SFSS; or the Child Support Agency advises they now owe considerably more Child Support or will receive considerably less; or Human Services advises they owe for overpaid benefits.

While some payroll people may think that the likelihood of this consequence is minimal, consider the number of employees you have with HELP/SFSS debts; that we live in a society where almost half of marriages end in divorce; and that a majority of families with children under the age of 18 are entitled to Family Assistance.

Over the years I’ve implemented this in a few businesses and employees still come to the payroll team at year end and ask why payroll didn’t take enough tax, or why they weren’t advised, when they quite obviously were. To counteract the employees who don’t read fine print, simply ensure this information is not fine print. A one page document that they sign and date, prior to undertaking any salary packaging, that clearly outlines the potential consequences and that they need to seek independent financial advice, is all you can do without physically clubbing them over the head or booking the appointment with the financial planner for them.

I can only encourage you to make the effort to implement this information into your salary packaging documentation and enable your employees to ask better questions of their financial advisers and to make more informed decisions. You will be thanked for it by the reduction in furious or devastated employees, waving their Payment Summaries around at tax time.

This is what you MUST make your employees aware of as a minimum:

Salary Packaging may (because some items are classified as “exempt benefits”) result in an increased “Reportable Fringe Benefits” value on your Payment Summary, which will be used (in addition to your Gross Earnings) to calculate your assessable income for the following:

Your entitlement to certain income-tested government benefits (including Family Assistance)

Before undertaking salary packaging, you are advised to seek independent financial advice from the ATO, a financial planner, tax adviser or accountant. If any of the above income assessable items affect you, it is imperative that you seek independent financial advice on the impact of salary packaging and increased Reportable Benefits.

The Fringe Benefits Tax year is April 01 to March 31 each year. The total Reportable Fringe Benefits for this period will be documented on your Payment Summary the following June.

Employees who receive individual fringe benefits of $2,000 or more in a Fringe Benefits Tax year, will have the “grossed up” value of the fringe benefits reported on their Payment Summary. This is the Reportable Fringe Benefit and the “grossed up” rate is 1.8692.

Therefore, if you receive $10,000 in taxable Fringe Benefits for example, this amount is multiplied (“grossed up”) by 1.8692 and becomes your Reportable Benefits total of $18,692 on your Payment Summary.

The additional amount of $18,692 is added to your gross earnings to calculate your income tested entitlements, outstandings and tax offsets as listed above.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

Human Resource teams go to great length to research and offer Employee Benefits Programs to employees to achieve their organisational goals and Finance Managers work their hardest to evaluate and implement cost minimisation strategies. The provision of well researched and planned employee benefits can achieve both!

The age old debate between Tax Minimisation and Tax Avoidance remains, but where you can legally obtain a tax deduction why wouldn’t you! Employers should be looking to these tax advantages and promoting them to their most valued assets, if they truly feel that they are the organisations’ most valued assets.

Kerry Packer, the iconic Australian billionaire media magnate and rival to Rupert Murdoch said in a tax investigation in 1991 – “I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Now of course I am minimizing my tax and if anybody in this country doesn’t minimize their tax they want their heads read because as a government I can tell you you’re not spending it that well that we should be donating extra.”

A Disclaimer for Me

The information contained in this article is based on Australian knowledge only and any action taken as a result of this article is to be thoroughly investigated as to its’ currency and legitimacy with the appropriate taxation legislation in Australia and any other country you seek to apply any information from this article to. While I am only discussing Australian options, there will be similar options in other countries and these will provide food for thought for your particular country, organisation and circumstance.

A Disclaimer for You

Individuals Are To Be Explicitly Encouraged to Seek Professional Financial Advice!

I’ll say it another way… You absolutely must advise individuals to seek professional advice from their taxation department, their financial planner or accountant prior to taking up any financial related salary packaging or employee benefits programs. Each employees’ financial situation varies significantly and there are financial consequences in salary packaging and encouraging people to utilise tax advantages that may not suit their individual financial situation.

Why Would We Bother?

A carefully planned salary packaging system can provide various cost savings to an organisation. Many automatically think that the company has to incur the fringe benefits tax (FBT) on employee benefits. On the contrary, the salary package can be structured to incorporate the FBT component, or employees can make voluntary after tax contributions to minimise the FBT liability, or both.

I will restate the “Knowledge is Power” and “Fore Armed is Forewarned” from the previous article. A benefit of working for your company does not have to be a physical benefit; it can be the provision of empowering information that assists the employee to make decisions for a better future. Some of the information in this article is simply that, tax advantages that are open to individuals no matter which company they are employed by, that they simply may not realise it exists.

If you are the one that opens their eyes, then they will hold you or the company higher and value the contribution you have made to them. If you dedicate some time to seek, offer and advise employees of tax effective salary packaging and tax deductions or offsets, they will believe that you truly do care and that you are serving their best interests. You will gain credibility, build business relationships, contribute to employee morale and more. From a human resources perspective, there are so many reasons to bother and these are listed below.

Liaising with Human Resources & Finance

There are very few organisations where the Payroll Manager will be able to get most of these offerings across the line without liaising with HR & Finance, with some managers even wondering how you dare to have the audacity to bring them to the table. I recommend you do your homework and have prepared submissions that sell the implementation to both your HR & Finance people.

Highlight the benefits to both the organisation and the employees, do your numbers, study the social wellbeing aspects, calculate your numbers and present the ideas that will require organisational approval. If you can work with the management of HR & Finance to bring some or all of these ideas to fruition, your employees will be thankful, at the very least.

Key Arguments for Finance

Potential cost savings of carefully planned salary packaging

Zero cost effect to the organisation of the tax minimisation offerings

Potential to reduce turnover, thus reducing the cost of employment and the cost of payroll production

Key Arguments for HR

Actively contributes to Employee Engagement

Contributes to Corporate Social Responsibility

Steers you in the right direction to becoming an Employer of Choice

The provision of valuable financial information contributes to relationship building, trust and loyalty

Employees achieve more with the same rate of income and perceive they are being rewarded

What’s In It for the Employees?

Employees obviously receive greater benefit from their salary or wage

The increased perception of working for an organisation that does actually value them

Beware of Award or Industrial Instruments Excluding Employees

In Australia, we are undergoing a modernisation of our industrial relations system and the employment awards within it (although some would question the use of the word “modernisation”). There have been awards that specifically exclude salary sacrifice arrangements, so ensure you review your employees’ industrial instruments for exclusions.

What are Non Salary Packaged Tax Minimisation Options for Employees?

The Australian Taxation Office has common tax offsets available to individuals. It is well worth investigating the offsets in your country and utilising your knowledge base (from Innovation 1 – Creating a Knowledge Base) to advise employees who may not know these exist or that they are entitled to claim them.

Pre-Declaration of Income Tax Returns by Employees (ITWV Variation)

In Australia this is known as an Income Tax Withholding Variation Application (ITWV) or if you are old like me, the former terminology is the 221D Variation. Do not presume that wage earners are automatically excluded from this as I’ve met many people with multiple investment properties, hands in businesses and all sorts of tricky financials who are school teachers, tradespeople and process workers.

The ITWV Variation Application allows employees to apply for a variation on their tax rates by anticipating their future tax return. Instead of waiting until the end of the financial year to claim, if approved, they will receive a reduced tax rate during the current financial year and will receive additional net pay on a per pay basis.

Publish information and forms on your knowledge base for employees who may not know that they can apply for tax variations on their earnings.

After Tax Voluntary Superannuation Contributions

Any employee can contribute additional after-tax monies to their compliant superannuation fund. There is no immediate financial benefit from this, but it has the potential to change an individuals’ future. If the employee is a low or middle income earner though, they may be eligible for the Superannuation Co-Contributions Scheme, where personal after-tax superannuation contributions may be matched by the government, up to $1,000.

After Tax Voluntary Spouse Superannuation Contributions

Additionally, if an employees’ spouse works part-time and is on a low income, they may be eligible for rebates on contributions (to a threshold) that they make to their spouses’ superannuation.

Deferred Income Payments

It is legal, under Australian taxation law to defer employee payments (by request of the employee) so the tax implications in one financial year are minimised. It is only viable to do this if the following financial years’ earnings are not going to be impacted greatly by the withheld payment. If an employee is going on parental leave, taking an extended period of leave without pay, or retiring this is an option that could have significant financial benefit for the employee.

Workplace Giving

Although this is technically salary sacrifice, it does not usually fall within the same structure or framework as the offering of salary sacrificed employee benefits as it is governed by separate legislation and is to be made available to all employees.

If your organisation is active in the community and values its’ corporate responsibility, you could work with your management team to encourage the board to commit to matching contributions. Your employees will feel that the company is working with them to improve the community. This program has so many benefits in the eyes of employees, it’s hard to understand why after years of the legislation being enacted, so many organisations still haven’t got a Workplace Giving Program in place.

Open discussion with registered business owners or ABN Holders to test the legitimacy of them contracting to your organisation.

This is an area of risk, but again, if researched and managed properly is a potential winner for organisations and employees. There are many people employed by organisations that have businesses registered and are true or legitimate contractors. Organisations should really investigate the cost savings of employing these people as contractors, providing they can pass the employee-versus-contractor test under the taxation system.

Use your Current Creditor List as a Potential Employee Benefits List

Almost every organisation has creditors (and debtors for that matter) who wouldn’t mind expanding their businesses and creating a few new customers. If your business is sizeable enough, it is worth speaking to a few of these other organisations to see if they would like to offer benefits or discounts to your employees, to potentially increase their customer base. Employees will see the benefit in discount or special offerings for:

Vehicle leasing or purchasing

Banking or Financial Products

Tools and equipment

Computers and computer software

Practically anything is of value to someone!

Partner with Personal Service Professionals to Provide Employee Benefits

Find professionals that are willing to offer their services at a discounted introductory price, with the potential to create a larger client base. Any professional who understands the lifetime value of a customer, would jump at the chance to service a reasonably large potential client base.

If you directed 100 new clients to a professional on the first occasion, the lifetime value of that customer base alone would far outweigh any introductory discount on the initial service. A percentage of the initial 100 clients will refer the professional to their friends and family. If that professional returned every six to twelve months and secured new employees as customers their business will grow exponentially just from your partnering invitation.

What can you offer?

Will & Estate Planning

Financial Planning

Budgeting Assistance/Debt Reduction Strategist

Health Insurance Analyst

Home Loan Analyst

Tax Preparation Services

Legal Services

You could also partner with local businesses to provide discounts or loyalty programs such as Car Washes, Cafes, Dry Cleaners, Automotive Repairers, Home Maintenance & Cleaning, Tradespeople… the list is endless and your employees will love it.

Salary Packaging Employee Benefits… now it becomes more complex

Public Benevolent Institutions (Charities) and Hospitals in Australia In Australia

Public Benevolent Institutions, Hospitals and similar industry bodies are legislated separately for salary packaging. If your employer falls under this legislation, fringe benefits are offered and taxed separately and differently to the standard Fringe Benefits Tax legislation.

Employee Benefits are “Fringe Benefits”

Under the Australian Taxation System In Australia, employee benefits are not income taxable but are fringe benefits taxable (including benefits provided to spouses, family members and associates as a result of the employment of the individual).

Minimise the FBT liability by Employee Contributions

FBT liability is incurred by the employer and is a major discourager to organisations. Employees who make voluntary FBT contributions can minimise or eliminate the employers FBT expense. Your organisation can offer salary packaging with a company policy that provides that employees will incur the FBT liability and incorporate it into their salary package or have them make after tax contributions.

Organisations can Claim Back the Goods & Services Tax (GST)

Where the organisation provides a benefit, then the amount expended on the benefit becomes the organisations expense. The benefit provided to the employee is a good or a service purchased or leased by the organisation and therefore, the organisation is entitled to claim the GST back on that expense (taking into account Goods & Services Tax legislation, record keeping requirements and the actual “claim ability” of certain items).

Without an effective and efficient management system, managing the GST claim back of employee fringe benefits can be an administrative nightmare. As with all complex administrative processes, a good think, a good plan and good management will resolve the issues.

A warning for employers who provide employee benefits

If you provide cash benefits to employees, such as Expenses Payment Cards, the obligation is on the employer to ensure employees are purchasing legal goods and services. An expenses payment card program should not be implemented without the explicit requirement to produce valid receipts to support the expense, which should tie in to the expenses payment card statements, which the employer should receive digital copies of for record keeping and benefits management purposes.

A warning for employees who receive employee benefits

If an employee receives an employee benefit under a salary sacrifice arrangement (including all purchases on expenses payment cards), the employee is not entitled to any of the following:

Claim an income tax deduction for the expenses

Claim GST on the item as they did not purchase it

Depreciate the asset on an income tax return

It is important that employees understand this, as they may be falsely claiming deductions on tax returns.

Example 1: Right to claim Educational Expenses Tax Deduction In Australia, we have the ability to claim deductions for certain educational expenses for our children. If an employee has an expenses payment card issued by the employer as an employee benefit and uses that card to purchase a computer, monthly internet connection fees and stationery for their claimable school child, they will not be able to claim these items as a legitimate tax deduction. These items were legally purchased by the employer and the employer has the right to the expense as a business deduction and any associated GST. For the employee to claim a legitimate tax deduction on these items, they would have to purchase them out of income taxed earnings.

Example 2: Claiming a purchase as a legitimate business expense If an employee also happens to own a business and purchases business items on an employer provided expenses payment card (or physically receives these items as an employee benefit), the employee is not entitled to claim these items as legitimate business expenses, not claim the input tax credits on them. These items are not eligible for depreciation under the employees business either, as they are not legitimate business expenses. The goods or services were legally purchased by the employer and as such are legitimate business expenses for the employer not the employee.

Example 3: Using Employee Benefits for Investments (Properties or Other Investments) Serious issues arise when employees utilise employee benefits (including expenses payment cards) to fund investments (properties or otherwise) or purchase items for investment properties. Again, an individual cannot claim a tax deduction where the investment or the purchase has legally been made by the employer, through the provision of an employee benefit.

Example 4: Claiming Home Office Expenses on a Rented Home where the Employer Makes Rental Payments under a Salary Sacrificed Arrangement An employee has their total rental payments paid under a salary sacrifice scheme and all other expenses are paid by the employee from after tax wages, including their utility bills. If the employee or their spouse is a business owner and seeks to claim their home office and a portion of the utilities as a tax deduction, they are not entitled to do so. It is not a legitimate tax deduction as the employer is legally paying the rent on the home. They are entitled to claim a portion of the utilities however as these were paid from after tax wages. If your organisation offers benefits that could impact individuals in these ways, it is imperative that you advise them of these issues. Mortgage/Rental payments and expenses payment cards are the two primary areas of concern, but there are others.

Basically, employees need to understand that if they are not paying tax on it, they shouldn’t be able to claim a tax deduction on it!

What Can You Offer With Your Salary Packaging?

An employee can be provided any legal benefit and if the organisation agrees, just about anything can be paid or provided under a salary sacrifice arrangement, again provided it is legal. Any offer of salary sacrifice should be accompanied with strong encouragement to the employee to seek professional financial advice, as some benefits can actually expose the employee to financial losses in other areas.

An example of this is the salary sacrificing child care fees in Australia, which would increase the employees’ assessable income with the additional fringe benefits value added to their gross reportable income. This in turn, could reduce the employees’ claim to childcare rebate, making the employees’ child care fees even more exorbitant than they already were.

If you have a staff cafeteria, it is common to offer meal expenses payments as an employee benefit whereby staff make their purchases as they choose and the bill is paid by the employer to a pre-determined annual value.

Other offerings can include:

Health and Wellness Programs

Weight Watchers or similar

Quit Smoking Programs

Nutritionist

Gym Fees

Health Insurance

Life & Other Insurances

Life Insurance (there is now a minimum requirement in super funds)

Funeral Benefit

Total & Permanent Disability (TPD)

Accident Cover

Trauma Insurance

Income Protection

Note: Income Protection insurance is claimable as a tax deduction at Item 24 on the Individual Tax Return, so professional advice should be sought on the tax effectiveness of salary packaging Income Protection Insurance.

The Australian Fringe Benefits Tax legislation has the “minor benefits” exemption. A minor benefit is a benefit which has a ‘notional taxable value’ (grossed up value) of less than $300. Where you provide an employee with separate benefits that are in connection with each other (for example, a meal, a night’s accommodation and taxi travel) you need to look at each individual benefit provided to the employee to see if the notional taxable value of each benefit is less than $300.

Don’t think you can provide a myriad of minor benefits to an employee though, as a consistent provision of benefits of this kind, could be construed as an expenses payments fringe benefit.

Please note that employers must report on Payment Summaries, all Fringe Benefits items $2000 and over (grossed up value, per the Payment Summaries gross up method) and this has to be taken into consideration by employees for determination of assessable income for other financial situations.

Industry related education and training courses would be accessed by more people if they were more affordable. Offer employees access to it appears that someone else is footing the bill for it. While this is salary packaging, I’ve separated it from the salary packaging section, as an industry or “in the course of your profession” course does not fall under standard employee benefits incurring fringe benefits tax.

Professional memberships and subscriptions to trade journals or industry publications can be provided to employees either as a company offering or under a salary sacrifice arrangement, if the budget doesn’t extend to servicing all of your employees’ professional subscription and membership requirements.

There is provision in the Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act (Section 58N) to provide Emergency Assistance as exempt employee benefits. Benefits you provide by way of emergency assistance are exempt from FBT. Emergency assistance is assistance for immediate relief of a victim, or potential victim, of an emergency where the assistance is any of the following: first aid or other emergency health care; emergency meals, food supplies, clothing, accommodation, transport or use of household goods; temporary repairs; any similar matter.

Read up on this before you offer it though as there are restrictions on the provision of “health care” and these few paragraphs do not cover the complexity of Emergency Assistance as exempt employee benefits.

Salary Sacrificed Superannuation

Salary sacrificed super contributions are not a fringe benefit and are treated as employer contributions. Employers receive the tax benefit of paying additional funds into employees’ complying superannuation funds. There are complex restrictions on salary sacrificed super though and both employers and employees must remain vigilant of the contribution caps, maximum thresholds, concessional components and age based limits.

The tax on entry of funds into a superannuation fund is 15% (and 16.5% on exit), so an employee pumping salary sacrificed super away needs to take into consideration their retirement needs and the tax rate that would apply to this money if they earned it as salary or wages.

Beware of the caps! There are caps on the amount of concessional (before tax) and non-concessional (after tax) contributions you can make each year. If you exceed the cap, there is an excess contributions tax of an additional 31.5% of the amount exceeding the cap.

Access to Financial Assistance Outside of Your Organisation

This was mentioned in the Innovation 1 article, but is such a pertinent item in todays’ crazy world with environmental disasters, high divorce rates, the rise in terminal illnesses, the collapse of the housing markets and all the other day to day tragedies we face as a community. Your employees may be in desperate need of financial assistance and most of us don’t like to advertise our desperation, so if we post on our knowledge bases ways to access financial assistance, we are providing an invaluable community service to our employees.

Look on your local council, state & federal government and welfare department websites for information that would assist your employees. Private companies also are able to assist in times of financial crisis, such as mortgage providers freezing loan repayments, superannuation funds releasing funds for crisis and so on.

Advising Employees of Available Tax Deductions & Tax Offsets

It costs nothing to post information on your knowledge base about employee eligibility to legitimate tax deductions and tax offsets. Many organisations are wary of their liability in providing such information, which is easily waived by posting tax department published PDF files or internet links to your taxation departments publications.

Some people do not realise that they are entitled to claim for the travel between work and their training institution, or the difference between what they normally would travel for work and the extended travel to a training course or business meeting. This is a value add for your “customers” that may have a significant impact on them.

Self Education expenses is another area where employees may benefit from more information as they do not realise the extent of the deductions they are entitled to. Additionally there is the Housekeeper Tax Offset; Education Tax Refund; Family Tax Offsets; and Investing on Behalf of Children.

Now to Get Started…

The offering of employee benefits is a minefield, but it’s a minefield worth crossing if you truly want to offer your employees the best value out of their salaries and wages and provide an employee benefits program that engages rather than alienates employees.

If you are unsure what your employees would be interested in, ask them! Even if you got together a working party and included a cross section of your employees in that working party to begin the big picture design. If you do your homework and it falls on deaf ears, at the very least you can begin to populate your knowledge base with the wealth of information that employees could utilise on eligible tax deductions and tax offsets. If they know about these options, they can plan for them and save their receipts.

Should you decide to embark on this path, I wish you well in your endeavours and as always would love to learn more from you or help you in your journey. You can open discussion via this site or contact me directly at louisevidler@optus.ap.blackberry.net

You are entitled to minimise your tax liabilities through investment activities and to receive the benefits provided for under the law. Tax minimisation is when you legitimately arrange your tax affairs to reduce the amount of tax you pay. These arrangements comply with both the letter and spirit of the law. However, investment schemes and legal structures that do not comply with the law are considered to be aggressive tax planning arrangements – referred to as tax schemes. A tax scheme is an artificial or contrived arrangement to avoid or defer tax obligations. Schemes often involve a series of complex transactions. They typically move funds through several entities, such as trusts, in order to avoid or minimise tax otherwise payable. Schemes may also involve distorting the way funds are being used to enable a taxpayer to claim deductions they are not entitled to.

What is a salary sacrifice arrangement?

A salary sacrifice arrangement is also commonly referred to as salary packaging or total remuneration packaging. It is an arrangement between you and your employer, whereby you agree to forgo part of your future entitlement to salary or wages in return for your employer providing you with benefits of a similar value.

What are the requirements for an effective salary sacrifice arrangement?

The requirements of an effective salary sacrifice arrangement are: • the arrangement is entered with your employer before you perform the work • there is an agreement between you and your employer • there should be no access to the sacrificed salary – if a fringe benefit that has not be provided by your employer is cashed out at the end of a salary sacrifice arrangement accounting period, the amount cashed out is your salary and is taxed as normal income.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

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“Ask yourself who uses what you do and how valuable to them is what you do. Then ask yourself whether they recognise themselves as your customer.” Anonymous

Note: I have attempted to eliminate usage of country specific names and terms for ease of reading by a global audience.

A knowledge base, for those that haven’t seen one previously, is exactly what it sounds like: a base point where knowledge is stored, to be accessed by those who need to understand information, requirements, policies, procedures and so on.

If you are in a large organisation, there has probably been a great deal invested in the design and creation of an intranet to service as a knowledge base for all the business and support units. Smaller organisations may not even have an intranet, in which case your knowledge base can be provided in print format in the form of Employee Handbooks, New Employee Packs, Information Handouts, Administrator & Manager Guides to Payroll and internal Payroll Operations Manuals.

Why bother?

Our first reason to bother with a knowledge base is to provide service excellence. Organisations invest millions and go to extreme lengths to implement customer service policies and programs for their external customers. These same organisations espouse strongly their commitment to their most valuable assets: their employees, but what level of human effort or monetary investment is contributed to providing decent customer service to internal customers? For payroll teams, these internal customers are the employees you pay, the management you report to (hierarchically and the provision of actual reports) and the dealings you have with all other people that “touch” your payroll service.

You’ve all heard the maxims: Fore armed is forewarned; Knowledge is Power; You can’t manage what you don’t measure. A good knowledge base will contribute to organisational effectiveness and work as a response to each of these maxims.

As you read through the article you will come to understand how a well thought out, constructive knowledge base, that is marketed well, can also significantly impact each of the following:

Building the payroll teams’ knowledge and capabilities

Improvement of payroll efficiency, compliance and integrity

Contribution to the minimisation of Error Rates

Provision of value added services

Empowerment of payroll team members, employees and participants in the payroll process

Provision of transparency in the payroll process

Contribution to the protection of intellectual property and business processes

Assisting in the building of business relationships

Contribution to the credibility of the payroll process

Highlighting the complexity of the payroll process

Education of your customers on the importance of compliant data inputs

Reduction of your daily reactive fire fighting activities and a turning of the tide into pro-activity

Who are we supposed to serve with a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base should service the payroll team, all contributors to the payroll process and our multiple customers including the employees we pay, the managers we provide reporting to and the other support units of the organisation including the Finance and Human Resources teams. Depending on the size and diversity of the organisation, additional support units could include departments that specifically handle Workers Compensation, Corporate Governance, Statutory Taxation, Payroll Accounting, IT or Payroll Systems Administration and others.

For the benefit of simplicity, we will focus on our primary customers: employees, managers and administrators of payroll information.

How complex does a Knowledge Base need to be?

Stick to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle every time. The less complicated a knowledge base is, the more it will be accessed and utilised. The volume of content you place in it will be driven by the degree of complexity in each payroll or business and the extent of employee benefits the company provides.

What information could employees possibly want out of it?

Ask yourself what problems your employees commonly have. What are their primary concerns and challenges in the payroll process? How can you help? You can build enormous credibility by pin-pointing and addressing your employees’ pain points. The provision of information that benefits employees and assists them to make informed payroll decisions and transactions, shows that you are empathetic to them and focused on servicing them.

The first place to look for employee pain points is to analyse your most consistent payroll errors and queries and establish what the constants are.

If, for example, you are consistently baffled by the inability of employees to correctly complete a tax form, then this is a must have on your knowledge base. In Australia, the tax file number (social security number in the US) declaration form has an information sheet attached explaining how to complete the form, but there are always the same issues presenting themselves by employees not completing the forms correctly. Additionally, if an employee submits their form incorrectly, by law, we are to interpret it using the worst case scenario which can result in taxing the employee at the highest marginal rate. Living by this rule is easy enough from compliance and processing perspective, but it causes great personal grief to employees, which is then imparted onto the payroll officer handling the aggrieved employees query.

This can be resolved simply, with the introduction of a document on your knowledge base titled “Understanding the Tax File Number Declaration”. Within the document, an explanation of how the taxation will be applied by certain answers and what the implications will be of not providing a tax file number within the required time limit. This simple task reduces so much grief and calls employees to action, as it is in their highest interest not to be taxed half of their pay. I have seen in the US, it is common for employees to misunderstand the W2 and W4 forms, this can be resolved by explaining the difference between, and the importance of, the two forms. If you need the explanatory note to be a little more “in your face”, attach it to the front of the relevant forms in the New Employee Packages or have it pop up online prior to them accessing the relevant online form.

The key to providing information that calls for action is to use minimal words, maximum impact and the strongest motivators. Remembering that many people are visual beings, include pictures! There’s not a lot you can do about the auditory beings, but technology might assist in that one day.

In Australia a few years back, salary packaging was extended by legislation, to all staff of hospitals and charitable organisations, in an attempt to counteract the low award wages and attract people to the industry. The biggest issue that came out of this though for employees, was the impact the seemingly attractive salary packaging had on their student loans, child support, child benefits and any other welfare payments they may have been claiming. Employees took up the salary packaging option without realising that it increased their assessable income for all of these other aspects of their lives. Once the end of the financial year arrived and they started submitting their tax returns, all hell broke loose. People were being assessed on their ordinary earnings, plus the grossed up fringe benefits and finding they had been overpaid social security payments and were underpaying student loans and child support. These industries are full of university graduates and also sadly have a high percentage of welfare recipients, in comparison to other industries. It was chaos.

To counteract this for the future, a guide titled “Understanding Salary Packaging” was introduced to explain these issues and each employee had to sign that they had read the guide prior to taking up salary packaging options. In the guide, there were massive STOP signs and warning symbols to highlight the potential issues for them. We provided little tips on how to circumvent future welfare or student loan debts, by explaining how to contribute extra tax to account for the salary packaging impacts.

Another constant query is new employees asking when they will be paid, which should be addressed in induction or orientation programs, but can be added to your knowledge base.

In your knowledge base, include explanations for employees on “what if”, “how to” and “what do I do” scenarios for the common pay queries:

What do I do if my pay is short

What do I do if I haven’t been paid

What do I do if I lose my pay card

How to change your bank details

How to apply for salary packaging

How to apply for leave (and leave payments in advance)

Why have you taken garnishees or child support out of my pay without telling me

How to complete your timesheet correctly (and preferably legibly)

The pay office is the first point of call invariably, and in most cases we have to redirect the employee back to their supervisor or bank or other area to establish some key facts first. Minimise these queries, by including the steps they should take, such as talking to their supervisor about incorrect pays as the first step so they can ensure the timesheet was correctly submitted in the first place.

Incorrect bank account details can cause serious headaches and can be addressed with a simple explanation note on the bank details form, or by having employees attach a deposit slip or cancelled cheque to the bank form for verification. When payments are rejected from bank accounts, it causes distress for employees and wastes valuable time that payroll officers could be utilising adding value to the payroll service.

Once you’ve established some vital information on your knowledge base that serves to eliminate pain points, go above and beyond and provide information that further empowers them, such as:

Details of your Workplace Giving Program and why they should be a part of it

An invitation for feedback or ideas from your employees

What Information Would Managers Want?

Again, start with your pain points – yours and theirs. Whatever causes grief, can be addressed by arming the right people with the right information. From my experience, I have learned that these are the kinds of things that Business Managers want from payroll:

No noise or fuss (just get it done correctly, every time, and don’t cause me any fuss in the process)

A miraculous discovery of how to halve payroll costs (good luck with that one!)

Advance notice of any potential IR, ER, HR (and many more R’s) issues that may arise through payroll

Assurance that employees are paid compliantly

Assurance that the correct number of employees are being paid from the payroll system

Workers compensation reporting on highlights of current workers compensation payments

Key employee statistics (average age, years of service, mgt to production ratios, etc)

Payroll Issue or Error rates of business units (Name this report carefully in order to build business relationships)

If you are a Shared Services Business or Payroll Outsourcer, management want to identify ways to reduce the payroll processing fees (which you can counteract with brilliant service options to again increase them)

Effective head count reporting that provides:

an overview of the company divisional allocation

exact reporting of total employee number

alert management to non paid employees left sitting on the payroll

alert management to ghosts on payroll

highlight volume of new employees and terminations

show turnover rates

These are just a few of the things that management want from you. All you need to do now is start answering these needs one by one. Your goal is to understand the management teams’ WIFM – “What’s In it For Me” and create reports that are “decision drivers“. If you haven’t already, learn about Business Dashboards and provide key metrics and statistics that management can easily interpret to know if action needs to be taken to implement improvements.

Talk to, and listen carefully to your management team and learn what information can be provided in value add reports that can drive their operating costs down. If management discard your expertise at the outset, create the reports and deliver them anyway and managers worth their salt, who understand the numbers, will begin conversation themselves and your reports will come to have some impact. Ensure you don’t send volumes of information out, as it won’t be welcomed. Stick to short, sharp numbers and brief highlights of what the information is telling you (i.e.: Absenteeism in Department X is 78% higher than all other departments) to elicit calls to action from management. The business should welcome your attempts to open discussion about improvement areas. Word your highlights carefully, as you want to maintain and improve business relationships, not create enemies.

One major consideration in the gathering of data for management reports like these, is the ability of your payroll or HRIS system to extract the data easily and how you present the data. If you know Microsoft Excel fairly well, you can create some great reports from pitiful payroll data extractions.

How Can We Serve Providers of Payroll Inputs With A Knowledge Base?

The key to providing a completely correct payroll service is the quality of the data inputs coming in to the process. This information alone should be enough to convince you that the payroll team should partner with every contributor to the payroll process to ensure the quality of the inputs.

Help yourself by helping the administrators of payroll information to understand what the requirements are by giving them a guide that steps through the process from their perspective. Outline the deadline requirements and explain in simple terms how it should be done. Not everyone that processes timesheets for a business unit understands the complexities of payroll or industrial agreements. They only know what they know, and that might not be enough to allow for a seamless payroll process.

Information in the “Administrators Guide to Payroll Processing” should also include helpful items such as:

Contact names and numbers of people they can reach for help

Payroll processing deadlines (including shut down periods and public holidays)

Frequently Asked Questions to enable them to handle simple payroll queries as the first point of contact for many employees

“How To” instructions on common issues or queries that they should be addressing

Identify common errors and omissions from administrators and let them know the impacts these have on the payroll process (nicely)

Any other information that impacts the quality data being delivered by them to the payroll team

What Other Information Would Our Customers Want?

To find out what your customers want to know, there are two simple steps to take. Firstly, you ask them! You can ask your employees, managers and other customers what information would help them and then work to provide it.

Sometimes, people do not really know what product or service they need, but have a problem that needs a solution, so secondly, you listen to them. Listening to your customers should be a systematic, daily process that is built into your personality, let alone your daily functions. One persons’ anguish or confusion could result in another valuable piece of information that many others could utilise.

Building a Knowledge Base for the Payroll Team

To achieve our end goal of providing a compliant, correct, on time payroll, we need to arm our Payroll Team with the knowledge they require to achieve that end goal. So many payroll teams operate from disjointed processes that usually vary between payroll officers. They’ve collected bits and pieces over time and invariably the loss of a payroll officer from the team also results in a loss of valuable knowledge of the intricacies of the process.

To ensure the preservation of organisational knowledge and the competence of your payroll team as a whole, invest your time in collecting, documenting and publishing vital information such as:

Documented payroll processes, checklists and deadlines

Orientation or induction program contents

Master forms used in the payroll process

Policies and Procedures relating to payroll processing

Legislation and Employment Agreements/Industrial Instruments that relate to your organisation

How To Guides (How to Calculate Tax on Termination, How to Pay Upon Death of an Employee, etc)

Tax rates and calculators that you need to perform all of your tasks with

Links to helpful sites that provide additional information

Answers to everything they need to know to serve your customers at their best

How Do We Actually Get People to Start Using the Knowledge Base?

Once you’ve created your knowledge base, the next step is to ensure you drive people to use it. You have to promote it and refer people to it regularly… If people ring with questions, you can refer them to the knowledge base on the intranet (or a document that you can email them) and walk them through it. Over time, this will encourage people to use the knowledge base as their first point of call, until the time comes when your queries start with this conversation – “I’ve just searched the knowledge base and I couldn’t find any information on …”

Encourage your own team to utilise the knowledge base by eliminating all other sources of personal notes and individual processes and holding your payroll teams’ knowledge in the central knowledge base (in print or online format). Every time someone has a question, a chorus of voices should either say “It’s in the knowledge base!” or “That needs to be in the knowledge base!”

Let’s Get Started Then…

To assist those of you following this series, I’ve opened a conversation on the Linkedin group “The Professional Payroll Manager” and welcome questions, comments or suggestions on the discussion board, so we can all work together to improve our global payroll world.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

“More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them.” J Harold

A critical function of the Professional Payroll Manager is to minimise, if not eliminate, error rates. Payroll errors occur for a myriad of reasons and if you spend your days fire fighting, rather than investigating, you will probably see a compounding increase in the ongoing error rates.

High error rates are detrimental to a service excellence focussed payroll team for so many reasons:

It is a reputation destroyer

Highlights compliance issues and attracts the attention of auditors

Interferes with industrial/employment relations

Inhibits efficiencies and blows out costs of payroll production

By implementing an effective measurement system, you can identify the volume of errors and the resultant root causes of each one, in order to execute solid corrective measures to eliminate reoccurrences. The root causes are easily identified and usually fall into one of the following categories:

Payroll staff require retraining or instruction in a particular area

Employees, Line Managers or HR staff require learning or instruction

Effective processes and checklists are not in place

Incorrect parameters (or a bug) in the payroll system

Input information is not supplied correctly

Fraudulent activities may be occurring

When building your error measurement system you need to record and analyse the following data as a minimum:

The affected employees and the rate of incidence

Dates of occurrence, identification and resolution

Who was involved in the end to end process

Who identified the error and how

Why it was not identified in the payroll process

The reason for the error

The re-occurrence risk

The corrective action required to eliminate further similar errors

Remind yourself and your team that error reporting is not about counting and allocating mistakes, but is about implementing systems and checkpoints to minimise errors and to improve capabilities, service and efficiencies.

An effective error measurement system makes good business sense, shows your commitment to service excellence and continuous improvement and goes a long way to ensuring compliance and efficiency.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.

Whether you manage a payroll of 20 or 20,000 people, the fundamentals remain the same. Large or small, the payroll function must always include the same integral functions. There are also certain personal qualities, attributes, skills, experience requirements and abilities that are required of Payroll Managers.

To successfully manage a payroll function means to achieve and exceed all of the positions requirements of the position utilising all of the skills and attributes listed above (and those of your particular position description).

A good payroll function lays good audit trails, through the use of finely tuned business systems that incorporate processing check points, explicit procedures manuals and organisational policies, which are legislatively compliant. You will be consistently evaluating and pro-actively moving your payroll function forward towards ‘the ultimate payroll service’.

A professional Payroll Manager consistently identifies risks, reports those risks to management and addresses them within the scope of their role. Risks in payroll management are ever-present, far-reaching and potentially damaging to cash flow, the share price & public perception, yet can be easily managed.

Properly managed and systemised, each payroll process can result in zero (or close to it) errors and be systemised to ensure it is produced in the most time and cost efficient manner possible.

Senior management will view a professional payroll function with the respect it deserves. They will seek information from you and value what you provide. You, as a professional, will have taken the time to understand what management require and how they intend to utilise the information.

The employees of your organisation will feel that they are respected. They know you will be doing your best to respond to their queries. They will hear the smile on your voice when they are talking to you and your team. No matter how inane the enquiry may be, you and your team will treat them with the utmost respect. Your external customers will be treated with the same respect, urgency and professionalism that you bestow upon your internal customers.

If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.

All materials contained on this web site not otherwise subject to copyright of other parties are subject to the ownership rights of Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager. Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager authorises you to make a single copy of the content herein for your own personal, non-commercial, use while visiting the site. You agree that any copy made must include the Louise Vidler T/As The Professional Payroll Manager copyright notice in full. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, upload, download, store, display in public, alter, or modify the content contained on this web site.